"The design is clean and modern, the videos are informative and the voiceover is written in a friendly, conversational style. I wish my car had come with one of these manuals; I'd pay good money for someone to show and tell me this stuff, rather than dig it out of a book." —juror Lou Kinard

"By providing well organized resources and clear visual support, this interactive owner's manual makes car ownership a little less mysterious. Seems like a thoughtful car company." —juror Diane Andolsek

Overview: Although this CD-ROM stylistically connects with Scion's urban customer base, its purpose is significant: to reduce the number of customer service calls regarding vehicle features. Included with every Scion at the point of purchase, it is both scalable and modular, allowing content to be easily updated.

• Content management through external XML file
• Hidden video Easter eggs
• 30 videos and more than 75 Flash movies

Comments by David Glaze:
"This project was developed in response to a somewhat surprising challenge: Scion's scores in the JD Power Initial Quality Survey (IQS) scores were suffering, but not because features on the cars were broken. Based on an ongoing flood of calls to customer service, Scion realized that many new owners simply didn't understand how certain features or accessories worked or, in some cases, what their functions were.

"The solution was to create a detailed CD-ROM 'supplement' to the typical owner's manual that focused on explaining each car's most problematic features. Placed in each vehicle at the port, the application needed to be highly scalable and modular so new content could be easily rolled out with subsequent versions. It also needed to reflect Scion's edgy, urban-brand personality and be engaging enough to keep viewers interested.

"Given Scion's eclectic style, we looked at several very different visual approaches and eventually settled on an abstract environment, color-coded for each of the three models. Since time was of the essence, the chosen look not only dodged the need to create new photographic assets, we knew that the vector-based style would animate very well in Flash.

"For the content modules, a key requirement was to show an actual person using each feature, so video was used in lieu of animations or slideshows. Mindful of the potential for the number of these modules to grow dramatically in future versions, we also developed a collapsing navigation that could expand easily without taking over the entire screen.

"The resulting CD arrived at the ports only eight weeks after project kick-off, printed sleeve and all. To add more content modules and to test and refine the interface two more (even shorter) production cycles immediately followed. Now distributed on disc and via the Internet, the program has been extremely successful."